Acceptable Norms & A Vision of Oneness

After each and every General Election, and during the intervening years, we need to let our elected officials know what norms or standards we will accept and won’t accept.

We look to our Jewish tradition for these values and boundaries. Remember, we are all connected: “When Adam was first created, he was pure. His purpose was to raise the system of worlds – Assiyah, Yetzirah, and Briah — to their highest root in Atzilut, and ultimately into Adam Kadmon, which serves as a bridge to the infinite Ayn Sof. But instead of drawing the transcendent light of the Ayn Sof into these worlds, Adam chose to eat of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.

Before disobeying God, Adam and Eve lived in a world where everything was one. All the worlds were one. All the animals, Adam, Eve, God were connected. But after eating from the Tree, Adam and Eve embraced a duality of birth and death, good and evil, light and darkness, happiness and sadness. This disconnected them from the Creator, with the result that the soul of Adam HaRishon was disconnected from the Spiritual world and shattered into many fragments, called individual souls. The Kabbalists call this ‘the breaking of the soul of Adam HaRishon.’ The soul fragmented into 600,00 root souls, which broke down into six billion individual souls.

To succeed in our work, we need to recover our Vision. We need to see again that the 600,00 root souls in the Universe are spiritually connected. We need to see that each of the millions of cells that comprise a root soul has its own mission and service to perform for the Creator and must come into a life all its own.

Each of us has long been a piece in a shattered puzzle that was once a single common soul. Now it is time for correction, tikkun, to regroup, reintegrate the pieces. This is the function of our world in this time, according to teachings of Kabbalah.” — Healing With God’s Love, Rabbi Douglas Goldhamer, PhD, DD, with Peggy Bagley